


Star-Crossed

by heli0s



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Mutant Reader, Pining, suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-02 05:55:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20271064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heli0s/pseuds/heli0s
Summary: In this life, Bucky hopes, maybe it takes two broken people to make a whole.





	Star-Crossed

The first time you meet him in this life, he is Bucky Barnes, The Rehabilitated Winter Soldier, dragged from two years of Wakandan reprogramming to New York by his best friend Steve Rogers. 

He’s stiff and careful— a walking contradiction because he’s powerful like a natural disaster encased in the thin skin of a scared boy. He stares longer than he intends because there is a tug somewhere in his memory of your face. 

“Nice to meet you ma’am.” He nods slightly, trying to catch better sight of your features. It surprises him to hear the Brooklyn drawl slip out. 

You dip your head, not meeting his eyes before you leave. 

Bucky turns to Steve, seeking answers. Everyone else had been so delicate and friendly with him. 

Steve is mysterious about it. “It’s alright,” He says. “Take it slow.” 

\- 

The first time you speak to him in this life, he’s on the roof with a cigarette between two fingers. It’s an archaic habit but now that he lives on the cusp of today and his many yesterdays, it’s something akin to muscle memory; a small comfort in the tumultuous twenty-first century. 

The autumn wind whips through his hair and over the scruff of his five o’ clock shadow, chilling him deeply. He misses the heat of Africa— stealing the cold, cold, memories of cryo. 

Sunset arrives, painting the sky of Manhattan in strokes of thick orange blossoms, petal pink, and dreamy baby blue, fading away. The lighter drops from his hand as he sees you on top of the edge, arms reaching wide as if you are trying to envelop the entire world within you. 

“Woah!” Bucky begins to yell, but for fear of knocking you off by surprise, his voice stutters in his throat and dies. You turn around with a confused expression before you step backward, toe of your bare foot caressing the concrete edge. 

Bucky finds familiarity in that look you give the azure distance, head tilted back, body thrumming with potential energy as you teeter over the edge of oblivion. Seventy odd stories down, you are aching for it. 

“Hello.” You greet. To his cigarette that hangs from his fearful mouth, you touch it and it sparks alive with a crackle. Then, you smile and go back inside. 

He holds his hand to his face, where the heat of your powers lingers. 

He suddenly recalls a mission long ago. 

\- 

_ 1958 _

_ Vietnam is hot. Overflowing with people and dust. His target is here _ _ \-- _ _ a former doctor, now defector, hiding away in a rural farm town on the edge of the jungle. The Soldier has tracked him over three countries. This is his last stop. He has no thoughts of the sun and the searing heat as it beats down on him, but his body s__till shudders__ in the summer breeze. _

_ Inside a turquoise cinderblock house, he blasts a single bullet between the doctor’s eyes. The villagers come screaming in _ _ their _ _ language _ _ that _ _ he doesn’t _ _ understand__, but they beat their small fists on his back and torso. There are _ _ swollen-bellied _ _ pregnant women and__ brown-freckled_ _old men. _ _ Gaunt children __turn away fearfully at the glint of his arm. _

_ The Soldier brushes them off. He’s not here to kill them. These people will live and die in their dusty conclaves. _

_ He steps outside and meets a blazing jungle _ _ where waves of heat __rush over his face__. A shadow flutters by the flames _ _ before it burns through the rest of the town. _

\- 

It becomes a ritual. He’s there at sunset every day to watch you stand on that tiny flat curb. Out of all the new and strange faces who smile at him. You, the strangest face of them all, he feels an old weight as heavy as his bones. 

The images come back to him more and more, unfolding like a paper crane, spilling its secrets as he marvels on. He doesn’t know when the next flap will pry loose— so he waits on the roof, stares at the cityscape of steel and glass structures. 

Steve reminds him what he already knows about you in the recesses of his memory. HYDRA asset. Cryo. Fire. So much fire. 

\- 

_ 1961 _

_ Revolution is conceived by disenchantment. It is born in violence. It dies flung up into the air by the tipping scale. He’s here to put weight on the right side. _

_ Of course, right is a relative __term and the Soldier knows neither morality nor relativity. He knows death and duty. _

_ The city burns so brightly at midnight the sky looks like dusk. He slips past the edge of the buildings and sees the flames __whip __past the perimeter__, __mesmerized __by the way they move like _ _ lashes of solar flares. __His body is drawn to the heat as if there is an innate, vestigial __need to feel opposite to what he will always return to. _

_ Back there, __someone else__ is __in the machine screaming against the mouth guard. _

_ The man__ with a patch of raised skin over his cheek__ and neck _ _ stands over the girl with tears in her eyes. Her skin is slick with sweat, and vapors rise from her arms._ _She is staring at her handler, corners of her mouth turned upward. A smile. A threat. _

_ “This is the New Fist of HYDRA?” he asks, looking the Soldier up and down. _

_ Zola grins a crooked, lecherous slant, “The Winter Soldier,__ Pyotr. __Isn’t he excellent.” _ _ He releases the machine’s hold and __Pyotr __hoists the girl up. _

_ “Winter__, __meet__ the Cleansing Flame of HYDRA. Mira Ignis.” Zola beams proudly as if showing two new toys to each other in a game of make-believe. _

_ He knows enough Latin to understand her name: Astonishing Fire. __Zola blabbers o__n about __the constellation of __Hydra__and it’s collection of Mira stars. A perfect, fitting name, as if God willed it upon them himself that they should have her on their side. _

_ The machine scrubs her again, and the hot tears that stream down scorch a pink trail until they fall off her jaw. _

_ The __handler sneers as he drags her woozy body away. “Serum-enhanced inhuman, capable of so much… if only—“ He yanks her roughly and she stumbles. “—she would listen.” _

_ Her eyes are motionless now. Mouth closed tightly. __Wounds healed. _

\- 

You finally talk to him after two months. It’s a curious and alarming string of words as he leans against the wall and you against the metal railing. The night had been dedicated to a Stark charity gala where both of you moved mostly in the shadows and out of view of dance floor lights. The others swayed and laughed inside. Even Steve, who has all the grace of a wrecking ball. 

He’s watched you, these past two months, warily and in waiting. It comes back to him from time to time— not just the way you release your powers— but in the way you stand. The way you walk. The way your face just goes _blank_. 

Tonight, he thinks you look haunting in blue— a deep, silky shade that reminds him of his old jacket. His funeral shroud for a service never held. 

It’s quiet on the balcony except for the rubbing of the material of your dress as you lean over more and more. Your spine curves like a sapling in a storm. A forlorn question mark. 

“What are we?” 

Bucky stares at your mouth, pulled into a smile that never seems to reach your eyes. He moves next to you until you look at him and not the edge of the forty-fifth story. He can’t tell if you remember him yet. 

“Broken things.” 

It’s not much of a conversation, he thinks, but it’s enough because your lips part in a sudden thought and he swears there’s a sparkle of recognition in your eyes. 

\- 

The first time you reach out to him, in this life, is on a mission in Venezuela. The hot, damp air sinks through his gear and drenches his skin. He’s constantly wiping his brow and knotting his hair tighter, anything to relieve the utter _wetness _. 

He takes Wilson’s place when a sudden alert pulls him away from this one— something more Falcon’s style— inner-city, with press coverage. He follows you through the Guiana Highlands and watches you burn through steel hideouts like they’re made of cards. Troops scatter when your hands catch fire and you let them live. 

He remembers the heat in Vietnam. He remembers the shade against the flames. He remembers no survivors. 

You trek higher, wordless still. He’s behind you, embarrassingly obedient, dizzy with altitude. 

The roar of the falls is deafening, muting his yells as you advance over slippery rocks. Your foot slides off an eroded patch of cracked stone and you whip around to catch yourself on his metal fingertips. 

“Then let me die.” 

The words pierce him all the way through. It’s too similar to be coincidence. Even though your expression is different and you are changed—monarch butterflies after metamorphosis still faithfully return to their homes, memories like vestigial organs, seared into their beings. 

Three thousand feet up, head almost literally in the clouds, you hang precariously over the edge of the cliff and he on your words—smothered by the roar. Bucky’s heart screams louder than the crashing water beneath him. His heels dig into the rocks, knees folded to keep his center low. You’re balanced on your toes, using the weight of him to dip as far as you can without pitching the both of you over. The spray and mist floats into your hair like crystal, over your eyelashes like snow. 

You’re smiling— so big and so beautiful it hurts. 

\- 

You’re a person who’s seen too much and wants too little. 

After Venezuela, he sticks to you like a second skin not just on the roof where you dangle your feet, but _ everywhere _. He doesn’t let you go on missions without him. He doesn’t leave your side when you’re at the compound. 

Wilson teases him— lovesick, he croons. Starry eyed. Smitten and soft. Pining after the girl who walks in fire like a phoenix rising. If you notice the jests, you don’t acknowledge them. 

But, love is built through stages of mutual reciprocity. Bucky doesn’t have much to give and you have even less to return. 

All he has is time. But he doesn’t think you even have that. 

You spiral faster, burn brighter, streaking across his line of sight like a comet thrusting towards the Earth to snuff yourself out. 

\- 

_ 1963 _

_ The Soldier disassembles his rifle and tucks it neatly back into the black bag. It’s been accomplished: John F. Kennedy’s brains are splattered all over the back of the convertible. She’s there too, sullen and facing against the wall. This was her mission and she failed. The plane into Dallas was supposed to catch fire. _

_ But now Jackie Kennedy is covered in red and he has to pin it on someone else. _

_ “Move.” The Soldier commands when she steps to the glass, watches the crowd ebb and flow in panic like ants in the rain. She places her hand on the cold window and stares outward— an impassive deity __overlooking the security that pulls the First Lady away from the pieces of her husband’s corpse. _

_ “She is sad. Like this.” Her brows slope downward away from each other as she begins to emote the wailing face like a tragic mask. “Pyotr likes that one most.” _

_ “Get away from the window.” He pulls her collar and she slumps backwards against his fist. He takes her back to their handlers. His mission report is always the same— the truth. It is this time too. _

_ Pyotr clamps his hand onto her jaw like a sieve. “__Another failure, Mira. __You are not as __wonderful __as Zola makes you believe.” _

_ “You hate this one.” She says nonchalantly to her handler before she practices the way a smile might look. It’s a frightening attempt. _

_ They run her through the Memory Suppression Machine two times and the burning smell from her scalp lingers in The Soldier’s nose until the frost of __cryo __puts him back into purgatory__. _

_ \- _

The first time Bucky dreams of you, you are facing him in a field of poppies. The sun illuminates your skin and you are glistening like a goddess. Celestial. Pure. Devastatingly beautiful. When you smile it looks like you’re in love. He feels his heart swell with dread because blood pours out of your mouth like a waterfall. 

\- 

_ 19__65 _

_ There is something wrong with her. _

_ They trek over the edge the Sahara and she vomits into the sand. He arrived yesterday to recover her from Africa. She spent f__our__ days __there on assignment __without contacting her handler. He hoists her up with a flicker of concern and she wipes the spit from her chin. _

_ “He put one inside.” She’s delirious with fever in the desert heat, “And took it out.” A wretched laugh escapes as she stomps over the sand. “A droplet— Not even fingers. Just all wet.” _

_ The Soldier __keeps her two more days. She’s infected and ill, and he’s understood why. She begs him to let her stay in __Egypt— let her return to the sun’s beckoning, where she belongs. __But he can’t. He takes her back to fulfill his mission. He takes her back to save her. _

_ They hose her down behind the sealed moldy tiled room. When her flames evaporate the stream, they turn it up until she’s pressed flat against the wall, sputtering and screeching. Her skin is bright red with the impact. _

_ “Bring her out.” _

_ He steps loudly into the puddles and hoists her up. Their handlers stare from the other side. _

_ “Comply.” The Soldier calls harshly, because it is their purpose. “Or you will die.” He __urge__s,__ s__ofter, because it is the truth. _

_ Her shirt rides up when he tugs her again. There is a garish jagged line on her stomach where __Pyotr __looks nervously at for too long. She wraps her arm to herself in a soft hug, weeping as he pulls t__he_ _hem _ _ back down. “Then let me die, Soldat.”_

_ They don’t. She goes back on the shelf__. _

\- 

The first time he holds you is in an extinguished cathedral in St. Petersburg, blown to bits by the recent firefight. New HYDRA devotees had taken the building hostage in the middle of a baptism. 

After Venezuela, they know your fire will reach them first. So they strap explosives to the children and run them forward. Wanda screams in agony when she contains them inside a sizzling red fishbowl. They burst apart like rattled snow globes before settling to the ground as molten muscle and blood. 

You burn every soldier you find and he’s never seen the flames like this before. Screeching whips of purple and blue licking the air. Your arms are encased in pure white energy and underneath the refractions of shattered stained glass he thinks you look like an angel. 

The others busy themselves afterwards working the perimeter with the local emergency crew, checking on those evacuated, turning over rubble for traces of the trapped. 

You slide into the single pew still standing, although it creaks with your weight. Bucky stands behind you, watching as your fingers slip over a tiny ruby rosary, wiping each jewel that drops into your palm. The string sticks, and when you open it up, he sees that they aren’t rubies at all. 

Big, wet pearls drop from your eyes and wash your hands clean. 

When he takes the strand from you, you lean into his shoulder and crumble like your surroundings. 

\- 

_ 19__70 _

_ The Soldier stares down at the man’s crumpled _ _ head__, bashed in furiously with __his metal arm. The plates on his knuckles glimmer under the lamp light. He takes the wallet on the counter side and throws it into the fire. _

_A smile tugs at his lips when the flames turn the face on the identification card black. _ _Like the way she might have if she could remember. _

_ Outside the city he finds her again, waiting patiently on the bridge. _

_ “You took an unnecessary route. The mission is not complete.” She frowns ahead into the river._

_ “Pyotr is dead.” He doesn’t know why he did it. He doesn’t know why he informs her. _

_ Her mouth twitches__. “__Lyev _ _ is my handler." She says mechanically, __playing with a spark on her finger. __His hand flexes. __The words that leave his mouth are not __his own, but they leave him nonetheless. _

_ “I will kill him, too.” _ _ He says, “For you. __Solnishko__.” _

_ But he doesn’t get the chance. He doesn’t see her again until he is __Bucky __Barnes nearly fifty years later. _

\- 

Bucky ignores the way the others stare when he takes your hand and leads you from the jet ahead of them. You’re unresponsive, dead-eyed and immobile like a piranha. Scarlett-cheeked with the heat of your powers seeping through you. Unsettlingly calm, like a grey sky before a biblical storm. 

Memory is a funny thing and he remembers the way he was cleaned and reprogrammed because how your mouth sits on your face looks just like his own. Like the cigarette— a lingering muscle memory, he moves mechanically here, too. He runs the shower in the shared facility on a tepid and lukewarm setting— to chase away the last memory of the two of you and a tiled room. 

“Look at me.” He mumbles as cool spray drips over you both. It hisses against your skin. “Not your fault. Not your fault.” He whispers it like a prayer, lets it dribble down his tongue. 

“Babies.” You stutter in return. “Children t-turned into d-droplets.” 

It’s a broken language. A scratching record on top of an old and tired player too many times poorly repaired. 

He rubs the ashes from your cheeks, massages soap into your hair, leans his chin on your forehead. You breathe the steam and let it fills your lungs. You sob when he grabs your face in both hands and presses his mouth to the shell of your ear. He doesn’t quite know who’s saying it: him, or the Soldier. 

_Z__vyozdochka__. _ _ Solnishko__. __Ty __chudo__. _ _ Ostan'sya__ so __mnoy _ _ . _

_ Little star__. Little sun.__ You are a wonder. __Stay with me. _

He sits you down in the shower and lets he corner of the tile cradle you before venturing to Natasha. _Pomoch__’ _ _ yey__. Help her. _

Natasha returns to Steve screaming as two red rivers gush from your arms still encased in your suit. They race each other down the drain, changing the water to orange and rust. 

Bucky is inconsolable as you slip further into your coveted abyss in the med bay. He doesn’t know how three months had turned into eight. Or how a past life turned into the only future he wants. He doesn’t know when he fell in love with you but now you’re blue like Siberia and you can’t hear him when he calls your name 

\- 

The first time he kisses you is when your fingers reach across the bed to rouse him. He’s slumped over in a chair and leaps up at your touch. His eyes take some time to refocus, glancing around the room tepidly as if he’s not sure where he is. And then like a flash of lightning he leaps over and takes your face in his hands. 

He doesn’t care that your lips are cracked and dry. His heart is louder than thunderclaps. You’re warm again. 

“_Soldat _?” You croak. He fumbles with the cup of ice chips by your bedside. With a sigh, you mutter, “I dreamt about you.” 

Then you close your eyes. 

“No, that’s not you anymore.” 

On the other side of the room, the others let themselves out. 

\- 

He takes you back to St. Petersburg the next week where the cathedral has posts all around it and the locals are making an effort to rebuild. You shake when your foot touches the ground and grind your teeth against your lip until it pricks blood. 

He leads you to a woman wrapped in black and presses the rosary into her hand. She cries—a shrill alarm before it transforms into grief. She holds the beads to her chest and speaks Russian to Bucky. You understand it too, but stand too shocked to reply. 

_ Moya __malen'kaya__devochka__. Ona __seychas __otdykhayet _ _ . _

_ My little girl. She rests now_. 

The mother places the rosary in your palm and kisses both your hands. She thanks you in thick and stuttering English. 

\- 

After that, there’s not much and too much altogether. He doesn’t know how those two things can exist at the same time, but they do. 

In the darkness of a regularly scheduled movie night, you sit next to him on the plush sofa that stretches around the screen. Your shoulder touches his but you leave before the movie is over. 

Natasha asks how you’re doing. He doesn’t know how to answer that because you’re silent, as usual. As always. 

But it happens again during breakfast when you linger in the kitchen with a cup of coffee. A smile as he comes in and you hand him a mug. It’s lightly sweetened just the way he likes it and he wonders how long you’ve been observing him to know that. 

“Can we sit together?” You ask the following morning. 

“Yes.” Bucky says too quickly, and has to stop himself from letting the rest spill out_. Anything you want. __Anything for you. _

He follows you up the glass elevator, standing on the opposite side with his lips pinched together, hair in his eyes. Spring time in Manhattan stings with the cold, but you lean against him in nothing but shorts and a sweater, radiating heat. You link your fingers through his and create the most perfect weaving of your two hands. 

“I remember you.” Your voice sweetly sighs. “Long ago.” 

His heart is so loud he thinks you must hear it. 

\- 

Steve tells him he’s never seen you so bright. 

“I’ve tried too, Buck. We’ve all tried. I’m happy for you.” There’s a look in Steve's eyes when he turns his head and Bucky thinks it must have been so sad because Steve won’t say any more of it. He thinks whatever may have passed between the two of you can remain in the past because he wants it to himself now; he’s had a past with you, too. 

He knocks on your door. Asks if you want to sit on the roof again. 

With a smile, you follow him up to the clouds and your fire warms the two of you against the spring night. A single, entwined flare on the rooftop. A midnight Manhattan sun burning a hole in the sky for hours. 

“Let’s take the stairs down.” 

He wants to stay longer, and the glass elevator drops too fast. His steps slow. Your toes cling to to each edge. Between the seventy-second and first floors, you press him against the railing and kiss him. 

He’s a hundred years old and you’re going to give him a heart attack. He tells you as much when you do it again between the sixty-eight and sixty-seventh. You giggle shyly and plant a soft one on his cheek instead before taking off and disappearing into the dark floor of your quarters. 

“I’m a hundred too.” 

He gives chase, despite the way his brain tells him not to— it’s too soon. It’s nothing. It’s a kiss. But suddenly you’re back and against him, flush like his own tactical suit, your face impossibly close. 

“Will you stay with me this time?” You ask, pulling him into your room. 

He holds onto your wrists, peel up the long sleeves you’ve been wearing since St. Petersburg. He touches the ridges that follow your veins. 

“Will _you _stay with _me _?” 

You pull away, rolling the covering back down shamefully and hide in the darkness, reply as a disembodied voice. “Can today be enough?” 

_ No. _He thinks. _I want all of your days. _Inside of him, that familiar and heavy weight, the Soldier’s dark mass nearly purrs in delight.But it’s Bucky’s mouth that opens, sides of his tongue already bent over his molars as he whispers _yes._

_ \- _

You’re wrapped around him like a glove, all tongue and fingertips. He moves too, tenderly over your body, kissing every inch of balmy soft skin, worships the faded seam he saw all those years ago. 

Bucky slips back into Russian— back to the Solder in your embrace. Doting, sweet names. Affirmations. He pulls the Brooklyn drawl even deeper back and calls you _ sugar, kitten, sweetheart_. _ Darlin’. _ _ Babydoll._ In-between, there is _malishka__, _ _ k__roshka, __d__orogaya, _in the language of your former lives—blurring now between your bodies and lips. 

It feels old. It feels destined and star-crossed, the way your body moves and the way his own replies. 

His love is heavy. He hopes you can feel the gravity of it when he slides inside, hands squeezing your sides and pulling you closer than anyone can ever get. In a past life the two of you may have been weapons. In this life, he hopes, maybe it takes two broken people to make a whole. 

The flaming trail of your descending comet continues its path, but this time it won’t be the hard Earth you might crash down upon. Bucky Barnes is there to receive you. 

If you drown, he thinks, let it be in his love. If you burn, let it be in his desire. If you fall, let it be into his depths. The Soldier inside of him pants for his little wonder- _Mira _. 

Bucky Barnes chants only your name in reply. 

**Author's Note:**

> this one is a bit of personal escapism from a depressive episode. lol. xx take care, lovelies.


End file.
